1. Field of the Invention
This invention generally relates to computer-assisted modeling, and more specifically, to a method and system for manipulating models by editing generated reports.
2. Background Art
Creating and documenting formal designs is an important discipline in many fields. Designs are often complex structured artifacts, and a number of complementary but interrelated views of the design are possible.
Historically, the most common approach to creating and maintaining designs has been a document-centric one. A design is comprised of a number of separate documents, each presenting a view of the design, in textual, tabular, and diagrammatic formats. It is created and maintained using standard word processing and diagramming tools. In creating these documents, designers often start from a template, which combines typical document structure and general explanatory content. They enter their design by filling specific design detail into the template, in a way similar to filling in a form.
However, experience suggests that this document-centric approach is highly problematic. Aside from offering only weak support for the creative process, deficiencies of this approach include: the possibility of inconsistency within and among the documents, and the fact that word processors' lack of support for a design's semantics precludes any automated validation or analysis of the design.
More recently, model-centric approaches have been adopted. A design is created and maintained as formal models, either as a single holistic model or as a set of related models. These models are essentially “directed graphs” or “semantic networks”, manipulated using modeling tools [AWB, RSA, TeleLogic EA tool]. Documents, which present the design in a form more accessible to a wider range of stakeholders, are then automatically generated from the model using report generators. This has proved to be highly effective and a significant advance.
However, some participants in the design process are not facile with direct manipulation of explicit models; they are more comfortable with conventional document preparation. Their interaction with the design needs to be in terms of the generated documents. They view the documents, think in those terms, and formulate comments and changes to the design as comments and changes to the document.